Deciding whether you should hire a wedding planner or plan the wedding day yourself is one of those hotly debated topics that couples go through at the early wedding planning stages. The romantic view of organising a wedding is how much fun it will be to choose your own unusual venues or go for a themed cake that isn’t on a wedding planner’s list of usual contacts, or add quirky touches that you wouldn’t be able to do with a wedding planner. There is the subject of cost and how much a wedding planner will cost and the possibility of how much you will save by approaching vendors without one.

Planning Your Own Wedding

If you are planning a small wedding, you are an organisational genius or you have the time to plan it, then hiring a wedding planner might not be a necessity for you. Plan a budget, put yourself a thorough wedding planning checklist together, purchase yourself a wedding planner book and take on the challenge! Give yourself plenty of time to talk to each vendor that you will be using, go on to wedding sites to find out what type of questions you should be asking the vendors and what problems other people have come across and make sure you have those covered.

If you are planning your own wedding, it is an idea to make sure you have a few people around you who you can rely on when the going gets tough – either a helpful maid of honour or a mother or a small circle of friends – even if they are just there to help you let off steam when it all gets a bit much.

Hiring a Wedding Planner

One of the reasons couples hire a wedding planner is because they are short of time themselves, they aren’t sure of the contacts they will need to make in order to hire the best vendors or they just don’t want the stress to interfere with the romantic engagement period.

If you hire a wedding planner, it isn’t an all or nothing decision – it doesn’t mean that you have to hand over the entire process of planning to the planner. You can choose what you want them to plan, whether it is some input at the beginning of the wedding planning process just helping you to sketch out what you will need to do and when, or it could be the organising of vendors, or it could even be the entire thing from beginning to end. A good wedding planner will keep you in the loop, asking you questions as they go along, so that the wedding is your vision, not theirs.

In terms of cost saving it often seems like a cheaper option to plan the wedding yourself, the wedding planner will usually have a list of contacts that they use and can get discounts from so it could end up being cheaper.

Whichever you decide to do, make sure you have a vision and that the day ends up being about both you and your partner and your own special vision for the day.